Every year, we look to surface the most creative and effective ways in which companies are using social media and recognize them with our Forrester Groundswell Awards. Since I have a focus on serving B2B marketing leaders, I want to make sure that you are aware that we have an award category just for B2B applications. Many B2B marketers come to me because they struggle to come up with ideas for interesting social marketing applications that target business buyers, which makes for far fewer B2B success stories, so we need your entries.

The entry deadline for the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards is August 3rd, so I encourage you to go here if you'd like to nominate one of your own initiatives, or if you are an agency, you can submit something you've done for a client. Josh Bernoff, one of the original authors of Groundswell, wrote a great blog post highlighting the history of the awards that you should read if you're not already familiar with the program. 

The look of the Internet is about to go through a major transformation now that ICANN, the organization that oversees the web name space, has approved the plan to introduce new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Instead of being limited to domain names that end in the familiar dot-com, dot-net, and others, companies will be able to put their brand name or category to the right of the dot. So Marriott Hotels could apply for .marriott or even .hotel. The city of London plans to operate .london.

There's been a lot of debate about whether there's a need for TLDs, with many marketers arguing that there's nothing you can do with a dot-brand that you can't do with a brand dot-com. What these people are missing is that you are not just applying for another web address; you are applying for the right to operate a domain registry at the root of the Internet, which opens up all kinds of new business opportunities.

I explored some of these new opportunities for Forbes in a blog post on the CMO Network . I go even further on what this means for marketers and what I predict will happen with TLDs in the next few years in my new report, "CMOs Must Drive Their Firms' Domain Strategy Now."

What do you think? Is this a nuisance, a solution without a need, a way to get more control of brand, or a business opportunity?

When marketing leaders come to me looking for feedback on their messaging and value proposition, it usually sounds like this (with blanks inserted to protect the guilty):

“We were founded in 19__. We’re the leading provider of _____ products serving the ____ industry. Our products are faster, more reliable, easier to use, more full-featured, and deliver better ROI than any of our competitors.” 

Painful to listen to. Marketers have to realize that in the age of the customer, business buyers don’t “buy” your product; they “buy into” your approach to solving their problem. Read that last sentence again. Your products aren’t as unique as you think. In fact, in most markets, the products and services are fairly commoditized. Buyers want to do business with firms that share their outlook on the world and have philosophies on solving key problems that align with their own. Yet so many marketers only talk about their features and benefits.

What do you do about it? Establishing a position of thought leadership in your market is becoming the next arena for differentiation in B2B marketing. When done right, thought leadership marketing is a way to stand out from the competition, create interest, and earn the trust of potential buyers early in their problem-solving process.

Of course, it is easier said than done. Many companies already practice content marketing, but thought leadership marketing takes it much further:

• It doesn’t just educate people on an issue; it provides your firm’s strong point of view and insightful thinking on the issue. It is provocative, challenging conventional thinking.

While trudging my way through the last few miles of the Boston Marathon last month, I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities between tackling a 26.2-mile running endeavor and implementing marketing automation.

Imagine if you decided to run your first marathon, went over to your local running store to buy those high-performance running shoes, stuffed a few power gels in your pocket, and showed up at the starting line? Well, chances are you wouldn’t achieve your goal. You need to be prepared for how to pace, hydrate, and fuel yourself. You need to spend the time to condition your muscles for the abuse of several hours of rigorous use. And you want to have people along the route to support you.

Over the past few months, I’ve interviewed more than 25 marketing and sales leaders to learn about their experiences in implementing marketing automation platforms. Most of them are using the technology to make it easier to do things they were already doing, like putting out a monthly newsletter, inviting people to their webinars, or capturing more leads and buyer behaviors on their website. 

While this is valuable, it just scratches the surface of what marketing automation can do, which is to help you create a demand management machine that supplies a steady stream of high-quality nurtured leads to the sales organization, a high percentage of which convert to pipeline opportunities. Getting to that outcome takes a lot of preparation because it takes marketing and sales teams beyond things they’ve done before.

"Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule." That was the advice Mr. Jaggers gave to Pip in the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. The same advice goes to B2B marketing leaders, because this is how your CEO, CFO, and other executive team peers are looking at your marketing plans.

Forrester's recent Q4 2010 North American And European B2B Marketing Organizations And Investments Online Survey shows that marketing budgets have grown by 6.7% in 2011. Seventy-eight percent of companies in our survey have increased their marketing budgets this year, and almost one-third have increased by more than 10%. Companies on average are spending almost 3% of revenue on marketing.

But the higher budgets come with "great expectations." CMOs need to spend more time allocating, managing, adjusting, and defending their budgets than ever before. When we look at how CMOs are allocating their budgets, we see that:

• They are shifting some investment from lead origination to lead nurturing to further develop leads generated from previous efforts.
• Although product marketing and product management remain the highest areas of investment, marketers plan to shift budget from those areas to community and interactive marketing to focus their messages on solving their customers' problems.